Original subtitles

[ominous music]

♪ ♪

[chains rattling]

[creaking]

♪ ♪

- There may be close to 450,000 bodies

buried in Greyfriars Graveyard,

most of them without coffins.

When you go in there, you are literally standing

on a mountain of dead people.

♪ ♪

[bird cawing]

There's a legend about the king's advocate

of Charles II, George Mackenzie.

He condemned hundreds of men, women, and children to death.

He died in 1691.

But it's said that he haunts Greyfriars Graveyard

because of the atrocities he committed when he was alive.

♪ ♪

In the 1700s, 1800s, children from Heriot's School next door

used to come into the graveyard

and dare each other to go up

to the door of the mausoleum.

[child chanting]

[music intensifying]

[clock ticking]

The question of whether I am a skeptic

or whether I wholeheartedly believe

the evidence put before me,

it's more difficult than you might think.

♪ ♪

Inherently in me, I'm a complete skeptic.

And yet, just the things I've seen,

the overwhelming volume of evidence that we collected,

it's pretty hard to ignore.

♪ ♪

I'd been living in Edinburgh for many years

when I heard a story that changed my entire life.

♪ ♪

[thunder rumbling]

This was a story that was told to me

by a caretaker at the church of Greyfriars Graveyard.

It was a horrendous winter.

[wind howling]

A homeless man came into the graveyard,

looking for somewhere to shelter.

- [coughing]

And he spotted a large mausoleum,

which was George Mackenzie's tomb.

♪ ♪

[ominous clang]

♪ ♪

[intense music]

[rocks clattering]

And he fell through into a chamber underneath.

♪ ♪

It was a huge pile of decomposed bodies.

♪ ♪

A dog walker, who was taking his dog at night

through the graveyard--

♪ ♪

- [screaming] [dog barking]

- Terrified, they both ran for it.

♪ ♪

Seemed like that was the end of the incident, really.

♪ ♪

But I began to hear rumors

there was something in the graveyard.

They had woken something up.

[ominous music]

♪ ♪

I moved to Edinburgh and did a degree in philosophy

and English literature.

I had a real passion for history, as well.

I love history. It's fascinating.

And slowly, I got to know the Edinburgh that I know now.

It's got a history.

This place stayed medieval long after the rest of Europe

had cleaned up its act.

So it's not just a long and rich history,

but it's also an incredibly brutal and savage one as well.

As soon as I heard the story of the homeless man,

I thought to myself, there's a real opportunity here.

I could do something in this graveyard with this story.

♪ ♪

I decided to set up a ghost tour company.

We hired four or five guides who we thought

would be good at what they did.

♪ ♪

However, it soon transpired that we didn't

have to make up ghost stories.

[dark music]

After a few weeks, I was doing a tour.

I'm talking away.

And suddenly...

[intense music]

♪ ♪

this man, he just went down onto the concrete floor.

A whole bunch of things went through my mind.

But the first ones had nothing to do with the supernatural.

It was like, should I call an ambulance?

He went down like somebody had hit him with a baseball bat.

♪ ♪

The rest of the tour was different.

The people inside the mausoleum were scared,

properly scared.

And then it happened again two or three days later.

Exactly the same thing.

The guides themselves, they struggled with the things

that they were seeing, as well.

One of the guides came in and said to me,

"I saw the scratches appear on someone's face."

Like, they wasn't there, and then suddenly they were.

After that, his whole demeanor changed.

When he would finish a tour,

he wasn't happy and joking about it anymore.

He was disturbed by what he was doing.

[gentle music]

♪ ♪

- The year was 1999,

and I had just started out on my first proper journalism job

at the "Edinburgh Evening News."

And this is my big break.

I worked with a particularly brilliant

news editor who'd seen a placard on the street

advertising ghost tours.

And I think there was some kind of claim about attacks

or, you know, this kind of vengeful ghost.

And he'd come back and pulled me aside and said,

"I definitely think this would be a great piece.

"Why don't you go along and cover it

and write a feature on it?"

It's a difficult subject, isn't it, because people

are open minded sometimes.

Sometimes people are complete believers.

Sometimes people think it's a whole lot of guff.

But I was a journalist,

and I was going along there with an open mind.

[suspenseful music]

♪ ♪

The night that I went along to cover the tour for the paper,

you know, it was an Edinburgh winter's night.

So it was cold, raining, a bit windy.

[wind howling]

It's pitch black.

But you did think, what's around that corner?

You know, sort of crumbling old buildings

and things with all the stories behind it.

Part of the tour was to go down into this mausoleum.

And it was cold and damp.

It was very atmospheric.

And then everyone came back out.

And Jan had locked it back up again.

And it was after then that a few people started saying

that they had felt something.

One woman has said that she felt

this kind of chill go through her.

Someone said that they felt someone grab them.

A woman also said that she felt quite unwell.

People were really, genuinely frightened.

They were very much of the opinion

that something that they couldn't explain

had happened to them down in that mausoleum.

I went back to the office.

I wrote up the piece.

It got a really good position in the paper.

[suspenseful music]

♪ ♪

It was a big selling paper at that time.

A lot of people read it.

And the fact that people were talking

about their experiences obviously resonated

with other people who'd been in the graveyard.

This was the days before social media,

so to kind of react to something you read in the paper

was quite a big thing.

[phone ringing]

We got phone calls from people who'd had similar experiences,

[phones ringing]

♪ ♪

people writing letters, people sending in photos,

people coming into the offices, into the reception,

and wanting to talk to me about their experiences.

♪ ♪

There was a woman that showed, it looked like

a kind of burn mark was sort of around her neck

that she said hadn't been there before she'd

gone into the mausoleum.

And then she'd come out and felt this burning sensation.

Someone else sent in pictures of a kind of

hand grasping mark on her wrist.

♪ ♪

I didn't realize really how much this story would grow

arms and legs,

because there were people all over the world

that would come to Edinburgh and have this experience.

So it was getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

[static crackling]

- Now to a somewhat puzzling story in Edinburgh,

where investigations are underway into a spate

of attacks in the city center.

So far they've been isolated to one small area,

but it seems there's little hope of finding the culprit.

Well, to explain everything we can cross live to the capital

and our reporter, Martin Geissler. Martin?

- Over the last eight months,

49 separate paranormal experiences

are reported to have taken place in this graveyard,

the most serious of which came just last week,

when a 28-year-old college lecturer from Edinburgh

noticed she suffered serious bruising

to the side of her face.

[eerie music]

- In the beginning, we were just writing down the things

that had happened to people.

[projector whirring]

But when the cuts and the scratches and the bites

became really severe, we started to record them.

And people would send us stuff.

♪ ♪

This one I remember.

She began screaming that something

was holding on to her and that she couldn't get away from it.

And then the next day, we got that picture from her.

To begin with, I simply didn't believe it was true.

I didn't believe any of these things were happening.

But then as the months went on, my opinion began to shift.

When the weight of evidence became so huge that I couldn't

ignore it any longer,

I had to accept that whatever this thing was,

I didn't have a good, rational explanation for it.

All I knew what it was doing, and that was hurting people.

It's quite severe.

Yeah, that one particularly, that looks like, you know,

that's deep.

I thought, how are we gonna justify it to ourselves

if it kills somebody?

[driving eerie music]

♪ ♪

- Poltergeist is a term. It just means noisy spirit.

Most paranormal experiences are harmless.

It's very rare to be harmed in any way.

So this is an unusual case.

The fact that the tomb was broken into it

does tie into a long-running sort of theme or trope

in the paranormal that there has

to be some kind of trigger.

Why is there a disturbance? Why do things start to happen?

It's because they're-- well, in this instance,

a tomb was desecrated.

And what's more likely to anger or make a spirit unquiet

than the resting place disturbed?

And it's not just anyone's tomb.

It's this controversial figure in Scottish history,

Sir George Mackenzie, who was responsible

for the persecution of essentially

the majority of Scottish religious people

for decades during the 1600s.

♪ ♪

He was the lord advocate.

He was responsible for enforcing

the king of England's laws in Scotland,

trying to interfere in the religion of Scotland,

which meant that the people that would not agree

were basically treasonous and tried as such.

And the worst offenders were executed.

So Mackenzie had blood on his hands.

I'm an investigator with the Scottish Society

for Psychical Research.

We investigate the paranormal in a scientific manner.

This one's fairly typical.

"On entering the mausoleum, I heard what can only describe

"as scraping steps to the right-hand side of me,

"though I was alone in the tomb.

"When I sat down, I took my jacket off.

"My mate asked me what the mark was on my neck.

"I looked in the mirror and saw what

"I can only describe as a red burn mark, like a big blotch.

It looked like I had three finger marks on my throat."

Not only is this quite a severe bruise,

but it's basically somewhere you'd presumably

definitely notice, if pressure was applied to your neck.

That seems to be really quite hard to explain.

However, as a responsible investigator,

I have to investigate things scientifically.

These might be psychosomatic.

Once primed to know that these sorts of things

happen in this location,

essentially you hypnotize yourself

and your body creates these effects.

We know from loads of psychological studies

that expectancy can have a tremendous

reality-warping effect.

The mind is extremely potent.

It has this ability to create physical sensations,

even physical injuries, even though it's your mind

over your own matter.

♪ ♪

But if it is paranormal, why would George McKenzie

be attacking people?

♪ ♪

- I was fortunate enough to be able to rent

a flat in Candlemaker Row.

And it was overlooking Greyfriars Graveyard.

So that became our office, as well as where I lived.

♪ ♪

At this point, I wanted to write a book

about the Mackenzie poltergeist.

I had all of this information.

I had collected all of these

eyewitness accounts, photographs.

I pretty much had sole access to all

of the information about the Mackenzie poltergeist.

I was drawn to this thing.

It fascinated me.

I was making my living out of it.

I wanted to write about it. I wanted to study it.

I just couldn't stop.

♪ ♪

But it didn't warrant the kind of scrutiny

that I was giving it.

It seemed like the only person who couldn't see that was me.

[tense music]

♪ ♪

- After the initial feature,

the Mackenzie poltergeist story

was proving really popular.

We're a newspaper, so we realized that we wanted

to not just report about what people were experiencing,

but do something more ourselves.

I chatted with the news editor,

and we were sort of throwing a few ideas around,

but thought that one of the kind of best things to do

would be to see whether we could get someone to agree

to perform an exorcism in the graveyard

and kind of almost try and move the poltergeist on as well,

because there were so many people

talking about it that actually we thought

it would be, you know, kind of the next chapter

in the story.

[eerie music]

♪ ♪

It's quite an unusual thing to be asking someone,

even that does exorcisms, you know, to say,

"Can you come to this graveyard and, you know,

try and sort out this poltergeist?"

So the first person said "Absolutely not."

You know, "It's just not something

that I want to get involved in."

And then I rang Colin Grant.

[phone ringing]

Colin was a Christian spiritualist

and a minister in a local church as well.

He was a warm, open-minded person

and very highly regarded.

But Colin wasn't really sure.

He thought about it.

And he agreed to do it because he thought it would help.

I don't think either of us realized the kind of impact

that it would have.

♪ ♪

- Claire Gardner approached me first with the idea

of doing an exorcism.

I wasn't particularly keen on the idea.

It was just this feeling with myself

and among the guides that, let's not rock the boat

any more than we have.

But it wasn't really my place to say, no, you can't do it.

And I actually went along.

♪ ♪

- The night of the exorcism, it was dark,

and it was cold, and it was drizzly.

I'd arranged to meet Susan, our photographer,

and Jan and Colin outside the gates.

♪ ♪

Colin walked around the graveyard

with his old battered Bible and some holy water

and some candles, working out where he wanted to work first

and where he wanted to be.

And it was all just very understated.

You know, you wouldn't think that something life changing

was about to happen.

♪ ♪

He set out a kind of circle of candles,

put a crucifix in the front

and a smaller crucifix at the back.

I remember he sort of paced up and down.

And he was sort of chucking holy water in various places

and reading from the Bible.

♪ ♪

There was power in the quietness, I think.

♪ ♪

You know, and I was kinda saying to him,

"What can you see?"

And he was talking about all these spirits

that were trapped and wanting him to free them.

It was a very intimate thing, I think,

that we were watching, of him releasing all these souls,

so there was a quietness to it.

[eerie music]

[shutter clicks]

♪ ♪

- [speaking Latin]

[music stops]

- But then once he'd finished this ritual,

he walked towards the mausoleum and got to the gate.

He staggered a bit.

We kind of all went, "Are you OK, Colin?"

And he said, "I'm absolutely not going down there.

"There's something too powerful for me.

I don't want to interfere with that."

[dark music]

Obviously, he felt some powerful force that,

you know, even with his experience

and with his belief,

he didn't feel that he wanted to take that on.

He said that he feared reprisals

if he started meddling.

♪ ♪

Colin did seem really quite kind of wrung out,

did take a lot out of him.

His wife was waiting for him,

so we kinda said our goodbyes and walking towards the gate.

And again, he staggered a bit.

♪ ♪

- Behind these gates was an open-air prison.

1,200 prisoners persecuted by Sir George Mackenzie

were kept in that prison.

Only 269 survived.

The human misery and suffering must

have been terrible in here.

♪ ♪

For spiritualists and spiritualist ministers,

they would view the situation as souls or spirits

being earthbound or trapped,

like some kind of distilled black ink

of human misery that just sits there.

And people entering the mausoleum

are like blotting paper,

they're absorbing these experiences

and taking parts of those experiences away.

♪ ♪

From a psychological point of view,

once you start to believe or expect the paranormal,

and that's that cognitive expectation bias.

You start to interpret more and more as being paranormal.

Every time you hear a creak or a tap against the window,

you might start to feel dizzy.

You might start to feel sick.

It becomes paranormal.

[somber music]

♪ ♪

- I went home after the exorcism.

Obviously, I couldn't sleep.

I sort of sprinted into work the next day

to write it all up.

When I had written up the exorcism,

we went through a lot of the photos that

were taken from that night.

And the picture editor called me over and said,

"Oh my God, come and have a look

"at one that we've got here.

We just can't work it out."

♪ ♪

- I'd done a few jobs with Claire.

And we worked well together.

And it was just another job, really.

Claire how to interview him, and I had to get a photo.

We got it all set up, got the candle.

And I did have a flash on.

And we kinda took a couple of different shots

and things like that.

And I didn't develop the stuff until the next day.

We were going through the photos,

searching them all,

and working on what we were gonna use.

And then this was when

we blew up this one photo.

♪ ♪

It kinda describe everything, because you've got him,

you've got the candle.

you've got the graveyards around him.

It was nicely lit.

And then this was when we noticed

this shadow in the window.

[terrifying music]

♪ ♪

I kept saying, "It can't be the flash,"

because the flash wasn't pointed in that direction.

And even if it was, there had to have been something

to cause the shadow.

So I went back that day. I checked out the window.

I checked the window sill. I checked the area around it.

There's no statue. There's no bust

of a head or anything like that in that window.

And I went back to my editor and said,

"There is nothing there that could have caused that."

There's literally nothing there.

♪ ♪

- Who knows what that is?

You could imagine it's somebody peering out the window.

But this is a perfect example of just

because you don't know what that is,

it does not mean it is unknown.

The story just keeps on going because people

want to believe.

- The story continued to generate a lot of interest.

But then I got a phone call.

And it was Colin's son on the phone.

And he rang and said,

"Colin's dead."

And yeah, I just had a moment of,

you know, that moment of disbelief,

I think, when you get a call like that, saying, what?

You know, what?

And he said that he was doing a reading

in his shop in Edinburgh, and was nearing the end of it.

And apparently he had said to the lady he was

doing the reading for, "I've got no good news left,

only bad news."

And he had a heart attack and died.

You know, like, all I could think about

was the time that I'd last seen him

at the churchyard

and how he was slightly exhausted

and how he'd talked so much about how that exorcism

had taken so much out of him.

And yeah, I just thought, God, that's just terrible.

And, you know, could the two be related?

[dark pulsing music]

♪ ♪

- When I found out Colin had died,

I was sad about that.

And this whole thing worried me,

because finally somebody had died.

So what might it do to us?

♪ ♪

And it brought it home to some of the guides,

especially, that they were playing with fire.

And one by one,

in the two or three weeks after that,

all of the original guides said, "We're leaving."

It's happy just to cut and bite and scratch you,

but don't push it.

Don't push it too far, because if you do,

it's capable of so much more than that.

♪ ♪

[static crackling]

- [speaking Japanese]

- Colin Grant's death really got the media's attention.

So now we were getting attention

not just from local media, but from world media as well.

We had crews coming from different parts of the world

and filming in the graveyard.

The poltergeist knocked out a couple of people.

It cut and scratched a few others.

But, you know, of course, it didn't do the tours any harm.

Everything it does is good for business

if it does something nasty,

which is one of the dichotomies

about the Mackenzie poltergeist.

And so we continued what we were doing.

Guys, welcome to Greyfriars Kirkyard.

Going by the book of internments and the records,

there is up to 750,000 bodies under your feet.

You are walking on a human lasagna.

[laughter]

- The really interesting thing about this story

of the Mackenzie poltergeist is it's basically

self-perpetuating.

You've got all these hundreds of people, their skin

coming out in scars and bruises and sometimes

burns and blisters.

You've got the spiritualist minister Colin Grant

sadly passing away, and all of that becomes

part of the myth, part of the story.

- There has been exorcism attempts

in Greyfriars over the years.

One in 1999 by Colin Grant.

He came in and performed an exorcism.

Allegedly a week later, he was doing a private reading

in his residence--bang, heart stopped.

He dropped dead instantly.

- I don't regard this as a particular mystery.

He was 66 years old.

There was a history of heart problems in the family.

The family don't regard it as a mystery.

- Some of the cases which seems on the face of it

to have the most impressive evidence

often have the biggest question marks

over them in terms of motives.

And certainly this case ticks a lot of boxes

because it's a commercial enterprise.

For me personally, I still haven't made my mind up.

It could be paranormal.

As a paranormal investigator who's open

to the possibility of the paranormal,

I would say, let sleeping ghosts lie,

because sometimes, you know,

unpleasant or unwelcome things can happen.

The story of the Mackenzie poltergeist

may be the equivalent of basically

people sticking their head in a wasp's nest and being stung.

You know, don't stick your head in a wasp's nest.

[pulsating dark music]

♪ ♪

- I thought, I will not be intimidated by something

that lives in a tomb.

And so I was still writing a book about

the McKenzie poltergeist.

In hindsight, we were just, we were ignoring

what was right in front of us.

And then it all came to a head in the most horrendous way.

♪ ♪

I was out, and I got a phone call.

"You'd better get back here right now."

[ominous crescendo]

[fire raging]

♪ ♪

[sirens blaring]

I ran back to my house.

Firefighters were tackling the blaze.

And they eventually managed to put it out.

And I went in.

Everything, I mean, everything I possessed was gone.

I lost everything I'd ever gathered on the poltergeist

up to that point.

My computer was gone.

Two years' worth of notes

on the Mackenzie poltergeist was gone.

The hard drive that I used to back up to,

burned to a cinder.

Everything was gone,

and my home.

♪ ♪

And yet, none of the other flats were touched,

not even singed.

The one above me, the one below me,

on either side--nothing.

It was simply my flat.

The firemen said it looked like a flash fire

that had just gone straight through

and destroyed everything.

Insurance investigators looked at the place as well.

They could not find a reason why the fire had started.

♪ ♪

I could have chalked it up to coincidence.

I still, there's a part of me that

doesn't want to believe it was anything

other than just a, yeah, coincidence.

Part of me does not want to believe

that an entity got back at me

because I was too nosy about it.

But it certainly looks like that.

♪ ♪

When the flat burned down,

I stopped being a tour guide myself,

because my heart wasn't in it.

[serene music]

[birds chirping]

♪ ♪

I started the tours because I'd heard reports

of something attacking people

in Greyfriars Graveyard.

I didn't expect to find anything real.

I've made peace with the fact that I'll

never know what I'm dealing with,

not the full extent of it.

The Mackenzie poltergeist, for me,

for over the last 20 years, has simply been a succession

of unanswered questions.

And so in some way, I have given up asking.

♪ ♪

I am now on the absolute other side of the world.

I live in Brisbane, in Australia, in Queensland,

so almost directly opposite.

Can't get me now.

♪ ♪

♪ ♪

[shutter clicking]

♪ ♪